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Stuart Hall

Authoritarian Populism:

A Reply to Jessop et al

In NLR 147 Jessop, Bonnett, Bromley and Ling contributed a long and

important article ‘Authoritarian Populism, Two Nations and Thatcherism’.

This article took issue with ‘authoritarian populism’ (hereinafter, alas, AP )

and the use of that concept in my work on Thatcherism; and proposed some

wide-ranging alternative theses. I should like myself to take issue with some

aspects of their argument, not so much to defend my work as, through mutual

discussion and debate, to advance our understanding of the phenomenon of

Thatcherism.

My view, briefly, is that in their genuine desire to produce a general and

definitive account of Thatcherism as a global phenomenon, Jessop et al have

been led to mistake my own, more delimited project for their own, more

ambitious one. In so doing, they obscure or misread many of my arguments.

They produce, in the end, a rather confused tangle of important arguments

and spurious debating points. Let me say categorically that ‘authoritarian

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populism’ ( AP ) has never been intended to, could not possibly have

b e e n i n t e n d e d a n d ---- I w o u l d c l a i m -----has never been used in my work,

to produce a general explanation of Thatcherism. It addresses, directly,

the question of the forms of hegemonic politics. In doing so, it

deliberately and self-consciously foregrounds the political-ideological

dimension. Thatcherism, however, is a multi-faceted historical phenom-

enon, which it would be ludicrous to assume could be ‘explained’ along

one dimension of analysis only. In that basic sense, I believe the

Jessop et al critique to have been fundamentally misdirected. The

misunderstanding begins, so far as I can see, with their partial and

inadequate account of the genealogy of the concept.

AP first emerged, as they acknowledged, from the analysis of the political

conjuncture, mid-1960s/mid 1970s, advanced by myself and others

in Policing The Crisis. 1 That analysis accurately forecast the rise of

Thatcherism, though it was researched in the mid-70s and published in

1978. It pointed, inter alia, to a shift taking place in the ‘balance of

social and political forces’ (or what Gramsci calls the ‘relations of

force’), pinpointed in the disintegration of the social-democratic consen-

sus under Callaghan and the rise of the radical right under Thatcherite

a u s p i c e s . I t a r g u e d t h a t t h e c o r p o r a t i s t c o n s e n s u s -----the form of politics

i n w h i c h L a b o u r h a d a t t e m p t e d t o s t a b i l i z e t h e c r i s i s -----was breaking up

under internal and external pressures. However, the balance in the

r e l a t i o n s o f f o r c e w a s m o v i n g ----- in that ‘unstable equilibrium’ between

coercion and consent which characterizes all d e m o c r a t i c c l a s s p o l i t i c s -----

decisively towards the ‘authoritarian’ pole. We were approaching, it

argued, a moment of ‘closure’ in which the state played an increasingly

central ‘educative’ role. We noted, however, the degree to which this

shift ‘from above’ was pioneered by, harnessed to, and to some extent

legitimated by a populist groundswell below. The form of this populist

e n l i s t m e n t -----we suggested-----in the 1960s and 1970s often took the shape

of a sequence of ‘moral panics‘, around such apparently non-political

issues as race, law-and-order, permissiveness and social anarchy. These

served to win for the authoritarian closure the gloss of populist consent. 2

Development of the Concept

The actual term ‘authoritarian populism’, however, only emerged in

1978 after I read the concluding section to Nicos Poulantzas’s cour-

ageous and original book, State, Power, Socialism , w h i c h w a s a l s o -----

t r a g i c a l l y -----his last political statement. There, Poulantzas attempted to

characterize a new ‘moment’ in the conjuncture of the class democracies,

formed by ‘intensive state control over every sphere of socio-economic

life, combined with radical decline of the institutions of political democ-

racy and with draconian and multiform curtailment of so-called ‘‘formal’’

liberties, whose reality is being discovered now that they are going

Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis , London 1978.

On the conceptual distinction between ‘popular’ and ‘populist’ mobilization, which Jessop et al.

seem to ignore, see S. Hall ‘Popular-Democratic versus Authoritarian Populism’, in Alan Hunt, ed.,

Marxism and Democracy , London 1980

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overboard’. 3 (I especially relished that final phrase, since it put me in

mind of how often the fundamentalist left is scornful of civil liberties

until they find themselves badly in need of some.) More seriously, I

thought I recognized in this account, and in my brief conversations

with Poulantzas at the time, many similarities between his characteriz-

ation and those I had been struggling to formulate in Policing the Crisis ,

‘Drifting into a Law-and-Order Society’, and so on.

Poulantzas called this the moment of ‘authoritarian statism’ ( AS ). He

added, inter alia , that it was linked with ‘the periodization of capitalism

into distinct stages and phases’; that it existed ‘in the form of regimes

that vary according to the conjuncture of the country concerned’; that

it covered, specifically, both ‘the political crisis and the crisis of the

state’; that it was intended to help us periodize ‘the relationship between

the state and the political crisis’. He insisted it was neither the birth

pangs of fascism nor an ‘exceptional form of the capitalist state’ nor

even ‘the fulfilment of the totalitarian buds inherent in every capitalist

state’. Indeed, the importance of AS was that it represented a new

combination of coercion/consent, tilted towards the coercive end of the

spectrum, while maintaining the outer forms of democratic class rule

intact. It did, he argued, relate to ‘considerable shifts in class relations’

(not, devotees of Class Politics please note, to the so-called ‘disappearance

of class or the class struggle’, whatever that entirely fictional construc-

tion of theirs might mean). But also, that it coincided with the generaliz-

ation of class conflict and other social struggles to ‘new fronts’. It thus

represented a fundamental shift in the modalities through which ruling

blocs attempt to construct hegemony in capitalist class democracies.

That was its explicit field of reference. There is little need to elaborate

on AS further, if only because Bob Jessop must be thoroughly familiar

with it since he is one of Poulantzas’s most meticulous and accomplished

commentators and critics, as his forthcoming study will show.

P o u l a n t z a s ’ s c o n c e p t s e e m e d t o m e e x t r e m e l y u s e f u l -----but weak in two

major respects. It misread the emerging strategy, since one of the

fundamental things which seemed to me to be shifting was precisely

the abandonment of the ‘corporatist’ strategy central to Labourism, and

its replacement by an ‘anti-statist’ strategy of the ‘New Right’. (An

‘anti-statist’ strategy, incidentally, is not one which refuses to operate

through the state; it is one which conceives a more limited state role,

and which advances through the attempt, ideologically, to represent itself

as anti-statist, for the purposes of populist mobilization.) I assumed that

this highly contradictory strategy------which we have in fact seen in

operation under Thatcherism: simultaneously, dismantling the welfare

state, ‘anti-statist’ in its ideological self-representation and highly state-

centralist and dirigiste in many of its strategic operations-----would inflect

politics in new ways and have real political effects.

Secondly, I believed that Poulantzas had neglected the one dimension

which, above all others, has defeated the left, politically, and Marxist

analysis theoretically, in every advanced capitalist democracy since the

3 Nicos Poulantzas, State , Power , Socialism , NLB, London 1978, p.203. [ See Stuart Hall’s review in

NLR 119. Ed. note. ]

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First World War: namely, the ways in which popular consent can be so

constructed, by a historical bloc seeking hegemony, as to harness to

its support some popular discontents, neutraliZe the opposing forces,

disaggregate the opposition and really incorporate some strategic

elements of popular opinion into its own hegemonic project.

These two arguments led me to build on Poulantzas’s insights, but to

shift the characterization of the conjuncture from ‘authoritarian statism’

to ‘authoritarian’ populism’. I hoped by adopting this deliberately

contradictory term precisely to encapsulate the contradictory features

of the emerging conjuncture: a movement towards a dominative and

‘ a u t h o r i t a r i a n ’ f o r m o f d e m o c r a t i c c l a s s p o l i t i c s -----paradoxically, appar-

ently rooted in the ‘transformism’ (Gramsci’s term) of populist discon-

tents. This was further elaborated in my article ‘Popular-Democratic

versus Authoritarian Populism’, where I drew on the seminal work of

Laclau, and his notion of ‘populist rupture’. But I distanced my more

delimited use of the term ‘populism’ from his more inclusive one,

attempting thereby to distinguish the genuine mobilization of popular

demands and discontents from a ‘populist’ mobilization which, at a

certain point in its trajectory, flips over or is recuperated into a statist-

led political leadership.

Levels of Abstraction

I grant that this genealogy is nowhere fully laid out; though I would

claim that it is plain enough from the context and sequence of my work.

I also grant that there was too little rigorous or logical ‘construction

of concepts’ here. The concepts, I am afraid, were generated in the heat

o f c o n j u n c t u r a l a n a l y s i s -----I was trying to comprehend the shift towards

Thatcherism as it was taking place. So, admittedly, the theorization is

a bit rough and ready. I explored the idea of ‘passive revolution’, for

example; and I still believe it has something to contribute to our

understanding of populist (as opposed to popular) stategies. But I could

not at the time bring off the link and have not been able to do so since.

Like many of Gramsci’s most fruitful concepts, AP remains ‘over-

descriptive’. Perhaps I have caught his disease. I suspect that a more

fundamental disagreement divides my position from that of Jessop et

al here. I do not believe that all concepts operate at the same level of

a b s t r a c t i o n -----indeed, I think one of the principal things which separates

me from the fundamentalist marxist revival is precisely that they believe

that the concepts which Marx advanced at the highest level of abstraction

(i.e. mode of production, capitalist epoch) can be transferred directly

into the analysis of concrete historical conjunctures. My own view is

that concepts like that of ‘hegemony’ (the family or level of abstraction

to which AP also belongs) are of necessity somewhat ‘descriptive’,

historically more specific, time-bound, concrete in their reference-----

because they attempt to conceptualize what Marx himself said of ‘the

concrete’: that it is the ‘product of many determinations’. So I have to

confess that it was not an error or oversight which determined the level

of concreteness at which AP operates. It was quite deliberately and

self-consciously not pitched at that level of ‘pure’ theoretical-analytic

operation at which Jessop et al seem to assume all concepts must be

produced. The costs of operating at this level of abstraction are clear.

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B u t t o m e -----in the wake of the academicizing of Marxism and the

theoreticist deluge of the 1970s -----so are the gains.

I would argue, therefore, that I have only used AP at the level of

abstraction and with the range of reference outlined above. I have never

claimed for it the general explanatory sweep which Jessop et al attempt

to graft on to it. I am therefore not at all surprised to find that AP is

only a partial explanation of Thatcherism. What else could it be? It

was an attempt to characterize certain strategic shifts in the political/

ideological conjuncture. Essentially, it refers to changes in the ‘balance

of forces’. It refers directly to the modalities of political and ideological

relationships between the ruling bloc, the state and the dominated

classes. It attempts to expand on and to begin to periodize the internal

composition of hegemonic strategies in the politics of class democracies.

T h e o r e t i c a l l y ---- i f a n y o n e i s i n t e r e s t e d -----it is part of a wider project to

develop and expand on the rich but too condensed concept of hegemony.

It is a sort of footnote to Gramsci’s ‘Modern Prince’ and ‘State and

Civil Society’. It references, but could neither characterize nor explain,

changes in the more structural aspects of capitalist social formations. I

do not understand how, even grammatically, AP could have been

misunderstood as a concept operating at the latter level. ‘In this field,

the struggle can and must be carried on by developing the concept of

hegemony’, Gramsci observed, in The Prison Notebooks , AP is a response

to that fateful injunction.

Jessop et al are certainly in need of no further instruction from me

about the concept of hegemony. However, I cannot resist pointing out,

at this stage in the argument, that I have never advanced the proposition

that Thatcherism has achieved ‘hegemony’. The idea, to my mind, is

preposterous. What I have said is that, in sharp contast to the political

strategy of both the Labourist and the fundamentalist left, Thatcherite

politics are ‘hegemonic’ in their conception and project: the aim is to

struggle on several fronts at once, not on the economic-corporate one

alone; and this is based on the knowledge that, in order really to

dominate and restructure a social formation, political, moral and intellec-

tual leadership must be coupled to economic dominance. The Thatcher-

ites know they must ‘win’ in civil society as well as in the state. They

understand, as the left generally does not, the consequences of the

generalization of the class struggle to new arenas and the need to have

a strategy for them too. They mean, if possible, to reconstruct the

terrain of what is ‘taken for granted’ in social and political thought-----

and so to form a new common sense. If one watches how, in the face

of a teeth-gritting opposition, they have steadily used the unpopularity

of some aspects of trade union practice with their own members to

inflict massive wounds on the whole labour movement, or how they

have steadily not only pursued the ‘privatization’ of the public sector

but installed ‘value for money’ at the heart of the calculations of every

L a b o u r c o u n c i l a n d e v e r y o t h e r s o c i a l i n s t i t u t i o n -----health service, school

meals, universities, street cleaning, unemployment benefit offices, social

s e r v i c e s -----one will take this politico-ideological level of struggle some-

what more seriously than the left currently does. That is the project of

T h a t c h e r i s m -----from which, I am sufficiently in apostasy to believe, the

left has something to learn as to the conduct of political struggle. But

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